The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a five year period?

Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2015, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Paychex Inc (NASD: PAYX), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a five year holding period.

PAYX 5-Year Return Details

Start date:

05/08/2015

$10,00005/08/2015

$16,13805/07/2020

End date:

05/07/2020

Start price/share:

$49.13

End price/share:

$68.07

Starting shares:

203.54

Ending shares:

237.05

Dividends reinvested/share:

$9.74

Total return:

61.36%

Average annual return:

10.04%

Starting investment:

$10,000.00

Ending investment:

$16,138.63

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.04%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $16,138.63 today (as of 05/07/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 61.36% (something to think about: how might PAYX shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Paychex Inc paid investors a total of $9.74/share in dividends over the 5 holding period, marking a second component of the total return beyond share price change alone. Much like watering a tree, reinvesting dividends can help an investment to grow over time — for the above calculations we assume dividend reinvestment (and for this exercise the closing price on ex-date is used for the reinvestment of a given dividend).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 2.48/share, we calculate that PAYX has a current yield of approximately 3.64%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.48 against the original $49.13/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.41%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:“The greater the passive income you can build, the freer you will become.” — Todd Fleming